he judges--Sulla's
judges--would have stopped him, had they been able. "Putting aside
Sextus Roscius," he says, "I demand, first of all, why the goods of an
esteemed citizen were sold; then, why have the goods been sold of one
who had not himself been proscribed, and who had not been killed while
defending Sulla's enemies? It is against those only that the law is
made. Then I demand why they were sold when the legal day for such sales
had passed, and why they were sold for such a trifle."[72] Then he gives
us a picture of Chrysogonus flaunting down the streets. "You have seen
him, judges, how, his locks combed and perfumed, he swims along the
Forum"--he, a freedman, with a crowd of Roman citizens at his heels,
that all may see that he thinks himself inferior to none--"the only
happy man of the day, the only one with any power in his hands."[73]

This trial was, as has been said, a "causa publica," a criminal
accusation of such importance as to demand that it should be tried
before a full bench of judges. Of these the number would be uncertain,
but they were probably above fifty. The Praetor of the day--the Praetor to
whom by lot had fallen for that year that peculiar duty--presided, and
the judges all sat round him. Their duty seems to have consisted in
listening to the pleadings, and then in voting. Each judge could
vote[74] "guilty," "acquitted," or "not proven," as they do in Scotland.
They were, in fact, jurymen rather than judges. It does not seem that
any amount of legal lore was looked for specially in the judges, who at
different periods had been taken from various orders of the citizens,
but who at this moment, by a special law enacted by Sulla, were selected
only from the Senators. We have ample evidence that at this period the
judges in Rome were most corrupt. They were tainted by a double
corruption: that of standing by their order instead of standing by the
public--each man among them feeling that his turn to be accused might
come--and that also of taking direct bribes. Cicero on various
occasions--on this, for instance, and notably in the trial of Verres, to
which we shall come soon--felt very strongly that his only means of
getting a true verdict from the majority of judges was to frighten them
into temporary honesty by the magnitude of the occasion. If a trial
could be slurred through with indifferent advocates, with nothing to
create public notice, with no efforts of genius to attract admiration,
and a